There’s no such thing as ‘business’

How the magic of human cognition is blocking progress

The human cognitive system is a marvel. It enables us to make sense of a highly complex world and navigate effectively through our day while our senses are constantly assaulted by a rich and voluminous stream of data.

Wherever you are right now, it’s likely that you’re taking in more information than you could handle without an efficient method of filtering that information, processing it, comprehending it, and storing it. Take a moment and pay attention to your surroundings. Really pay attention. What do you see around you? What do you hear? Are there any smells? What sensations do you feel on your skin? Are you eating while reading my article? What are you tasting? And did you bring enough for both of us?!

If you’re really paying full attention, there could easily be hundreds of data points you’re processing. Every second. Every millisecond!

What the #$^% does this have to do with business?! Patience my friend. Patience. I promise we’ll get there. Together.

I’m sitting in my hotel room at a desk right now. There are 22 objects on the desk plus a picture on the wall right in front of me.

But actually, there are far more than 22 objects on the desk. Take my watch as an example. I see a knob, a button, the metal case, the glass face, the leather strap. So my watch is 5 objects as far as my visual system is concerned. The lamp on the desk has a base, with an outlet, a switch, a warning sticker, a glass bowl on top of the base, and a metal tube going up from that glass bowl into a lampshade. So that one lamp is actually 7 objects — more if I count the 21 letters and numbers on the sticker.

If I break apart the 22 objects on this desk into the constituent elements that I can see, those 22 objects are really 56 objects. Oh wait, my computer.

Counting all the keys on the keyboard and the other parts I can see, my computer is 89 objects. Scratch that, it’s way more. Every one of the 83 keys on the keyboard (including the touch bar on my MacBook Pro) has at least one symbol on it. So, my computer is actually at least 172 objects bringing the total on the desk to 227. But actually, it’s far more than that. Some of the keys have more than one symbol. For example, one of the digital buttons on the touch bar allows me to create a bulleted list. It has 3 bullets and three dashes. I could easily count an additional 50+ objects on my keyboard if I include all the symbols plus the letters on the delete, return, esc, control, fn, option, command, and caps lock buttons.

It gets even more complex. I counted each letter as an object. The letter ‘T’ is one object. Right? Well, maybe not. I see two lines: a horizontal line at the top and a vertical line centered on that horizontal line. So the ‘T’ is actually two objects right? Not really. Each of those 2 lines is actually many points that make up the line.

You probably started getting seriously bored at least two paragraphs ago. If you’re still reading this, it’s a small miracle. Take a moment and pat yourself on the back for being among the tiny group of people that have made it this far.

No, seriously. Pat yourself on the back.

I’ll wait.

Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

There. Wasn’t that nice?

Think of how boring and annoying it was to read about all those objects. And I haven’t even started trying to count the number of objects in the picture on the wall. Or the sounds and smells in this room. Or the bodily sensations I’m having, like the feel of my feet on the floor, my derriere on the seat, and so on. It took me quite a few minutes to count all those objects. I barely scratched the surface of all the stimuli around me and during that time, I got nothing accomplished.

How do we manage to live our lives and get anything done amidst this massive stream of information that constantly comes at us?

Well, that’s where our marvelous cognitive system comes in. Let’s go back to the letter ‘T’. Consider the two lines that make up the ‘T’. My visual system didn’t really see them as many points, just as two lines. Actually, I just saw the letter ‘T’. And that was only when I forced myself to really look. When I first looked, all I really saw was a computer. My cognitive system processed more than 200 objects in milliseconds, and I recognized this complex object that I’m typing on right now as my computer.

One of the primary cognitive mechanisms that helps us accomplish these amazing feats is categorization. My cognitive system lumped many pieces of information together into a category called ‘my computer’. Most of the time that’s all I would need to know.

But if you asked me a question about the keys, I would instantly be able to visually separate the keyboard from the other components of the computer and answer your question. So ‘keyboard’ is a subcategory of ‘computer’ and I can bring that subcategory into consciousness when necessary to accomplish a task.

Categorization is amazing.

It allows us to make sense of the world by putting everything into a neat little box, and to nest those boxes so we can engage at whatever level of abstraction is required to accomplish a task.

Each category is, essentially, a set of boundaries, a border. Whatever is inside the border we consider as one thing and everything outside the border is not that thing.

This is one of the many wonders of the human mind that allows us to move through our day getting shit done without our brains constantly overloading.

And categorization is way more incredible than that. Because it’s not simply a passive system that observes, catalogs, and classifies objects. It’s a creative act by which we impose meaning on our world, rather than merely observing meaning that’s already there.

For example, when my then-fiancé and I were planning our wedding, we created a category called ‘people we want at our wedding’. That category could not have existed before we started planning a wedding.

Categorization is a choice.

I am not forced by nature to see all human beings as either people I want at my wedding or people I don’t. That’s a choice I can make if it helps me achieve certain goals — such as not having to spend billions of dollars on a wedding.

Incidentally, this act, this choice to impose meaning on the world is also one of the primary drivers of love and hate. We can categorize people by race, age, sex, nationality, religion, eye color, and many other variables.

We then ascribe meaning to our categories. That’s why we have categories in the first place. When I draw a boundary around the people I want at my wedding, everyone that falls inside that line is my guest list and everyone that falls outside the line is not. It helps me quickly figure out what kind of venue we need, how much food we need to order, and how much sound equipment the DJ should bring. Clearly, the category ‘people I want at my wedding’ is helpful to me.

But that choice had consequences for other people. One consequence is that there is only a .000001% chance that you were at my wedding. That’s partly a shame for you. It was an awesome wedding. (I’m talking about my second wedding here folks. No comment on the first one.) But you’re probably doing OK in life if you missed my wedding. No damage was done.

That’s not true about all acts of categorization. Some cause a lot of harm.

I invite you to think about how you categorize the world — and which categories might cause more harm than good.

What makes this difficult is that we have to categorize people. We have to draw borders so that some people fall inside and some fall outside.

If not, I would have had to invite every person in the world to my wedding. And that wasn’t the sort of wedding we wanted.

We have to draw borders around the people we feel safe leaving our children with and people we don’t. Or people we feel safe sharing our credit card number with and people we don’t.

We have to categorize things in the world — including people — in order to move through our lives and accomplish anything.

But we have a choice about where we draw those borders and how much meaning we ascribe to them. Those choices matter. They have consequences.

I’m here now to write about one of those categories that I believe has utility but causes harm. I’m talking about ‘business’.

Like ‘people I want at my wedding’, ‘business’ didn’t exist until we created it. All the people in the world existed before I started working on my wedding invitation list. But the category ‘people I want at my wedding’ never existed until I conjured it. Same with ‘business’. All the people, objects, and actions of business existed and could exist without people deciding to draw a border around them. But the category ‘business’ is a choice people made — and continue to make.

And that choice has consequences.

Like all acts of categorization, there are good reasons to draw a border around the stuff of business. For example, the category ‘business’ tells us that we have to generate profit — otherwise a business would be a not-for-profit. Or a social club.

But like all acts of categorization, the choice to draw borders around business can cause harm.

Consider the saying “it’s not personal, it’s just business”. That is basically a license to be an asshole to people without having to feel guilty.

Or consider all the negative impacts of business. Negative impacts to the financial, mental, or emotional wellbeing of workers. Negative impacts to communities. To countries. To the environment.

You cannot read the news today without seeing something about the damage caused by business. Whether it’s companies making unhealthy food — and deploying marketing tactics to hook people so they consume more than they should. Or tech companies with massive platforms who have designed them to be addictive — without regard for the devastating impact they leave in their wake on the self-esteem of young people, on our social discourse, and on our elections. Or even the way we so often — driven by our egos — play the corporate political game and trample on others as we seek to rise ever upward and amass more power and more money.

Why do we allow ourselves as ‘businesspeople’ to cause harm to people, communities, countries, and the environment? Are we all evil?

Well, some people are. Some people really are just heartless assholes. But the vast majority aren’t. There is a far more mundane answer to why we allow ourselves to cause harm in the context of business.

In creating the category ‘business’ we have assigned meaning to our creation. We have created a set of norms and rules that exist inside of ‘business’ but do not exist outside of it. Those norms and rules encourage and tolerate certain behaviors that we do not encourage and tolerate outside of business.

We have conjured up a thing that we believe exists in the world independently of our will as humans. But it’s just not so. And like, perhaps, all the categories we create, we become blind to the fact that the category only exists because we choose to let it exist. We genuinely believe there’s a thing in the world called ‘business’ that’s separate from all of the other things that are ‘not business’.

It’s just a figment of our imagination but we treat it as an objective truth that we must obey.

This is one of the primary objections I hear to the introduction of higher purpose and values into business. “Well purpose is all well and good but let’s be real here — this is a business…” And with that one sentence, many eagerly toss purpose-driven business into the trash bin of ideas.

Here’s the reality my friends.

The people, objects, and actions that we consider ‘business’ do exist. But the category is nothing more than an act of human will. Don’t get me wrong, the category is useful. As I said above, it reminds us that we have to generate profit at work. But it also has a shadow side. It allows us to pretend that when we cause harm through our work, it’s just ‘business’. It gives us a pass so we can hold onto the belief that we’re still good people even as we spread pain and destruction.

It’s a lie. If you’re an asshole at work, you’re an asshole. Period.

And you, my dear reader, are no asshole.

So, we have to be more conscious about how we categorize. I offer two ideas on how we can adjust our categorization of ‘business’ to make business a more consistent force for good in the world.

1.

Let’s remember not to take our categories too seriously. Not to give them more meaning than is required to accomplish our task. The category I created called ‘people I want at my wedding’ was useful. It enabled me to have the kind of wedding I wanted without having to feed the entire planet. But I don’t have to see people inside of the boundaries as fundamentally better than those outside of the boundaries. In fact, there are wonderful people I dearly love that were not invited to the wedding. The category had one use only — to help me get to a manageable wedding list. I don’t have to ascribe any more meaning to it than that. Nor do I have to allow the category to exist past the point in time when it was helpful.

‘Business’ as a category is useful. But we don’t have to ascribe any more meaning to it than is required to ensure that the organization generates profit and complies with the relevant laws and regulations. We certainly do not have to accept behaviors within the context of ‘business’ that we would consider cruel or just unacceptable in our ‘personal lives’.

2.

We have to remind ourselves that the category we call ‘business’ is one of many subcategories of ‘human activity’ — along with ‘going on hikes’, ‘dating’, ‘eating’, and everything else we do.

As a subcategory of ‘human activity’, business is subject to all the rules, norms, and expectations we have of any human behavior.

It’s every bit as silly to believe that we’re permitted to cause harm to someone while we’re ‘doing business’ as it is to believe that we’re permitted to cause that harm while we’re ‘eating’. Yet many people who would see the absurdity in giving themselves a pass to be an asshole because they’re eating would absolutely give themselves that pass because “it’s business”.

Stop and take in the full measure of that absurdity.

From the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep, we engage in a stream of behavior. We live our lives. We attend to our physical needs, we have conversations with friends and family, we have conversations with people at work, we shop, we plan our next vacation, we take out the garbage. All of it. And in today’s working environment, most of us probably mix those activities throughout the day — meaning, during “work hours” we are handling our personal affairs and during “non work hours” we are working.

And for some reason, we have looked over that stream of hundreds of behaviors every day, tagged a subset of them as ‘business’, and concluded that the rules, norms, and expectations we have of human behavior do not apply to those behaviors tagged as ‘business’. Those behaviors get a pass.

Why?

Does the mere fact that money is involved magically release us from our responsibility to be good?

Of course not!

Let me be very clear. This is not intended as an anti-business polemic. It is intended as an anti ‘business’ polemic.

Business can be — and often is — a force for good in the world. When people engaged in business see their work as a part of their humanity and see business as just one sphere of human endeavor among many — subject to all moral and ethical norms we aspire to hold humans to, business makes the world a better place.

But when we see business as a domain side and separate from humanity, when we see our behavior at work as exempt from the norms of good human behavior, we allow ourselves to take actions that would embarrass us were we to engage in them outside of work.

It’s time for this to stop.

Business needs ‘business’ to go away.

So does the world.

If you, like me, are troubled by the harm that business causes at times, if you would like to see a world where businesses are more conscious of their impact on people and the planet and act in a more responsible way, let’s remind ourselves and those around us that the categories we create, the boundaries we establish have consequences.

Let’s remind ourselves that our categories are a choice. And that we have the right — the responsibility — to be thoughtful about how much and what kind of meaning we ascribe to ‘business’.

Finally, let’s remember that everything we do “at work” has a ripple effect on people, communities, society, countries, and the planet. We can choose to make that impact positive and to never give ourselves a pass because “it’s just business”.